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Andrew Michael Hurley

A Chilling Tale from a master of suspense

I discovered this story some time back and it has lingered with me since then. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be the Allisons urban dwellers, who occupy a particular remote lakeside house every summer. During this visit, instead of going back to the city, they decide to prolong their holiday a few more weeks – something that seems to disturb everyone in the adjacent village. Everyone conveys an identical cryptic advice that not a soul has lingered in the area past the end of summer. Regardless, the couple insist to remain, and that’s when events begin to become stranger. The man who brings fuel won’t sell for them. Not a single person will deliver food to the cabin, and when they endeavor to go to the village, the car fails to start. A tempest builds, the power in the radio die, and when night comes, “the aged individuals crowded closely in their summer cottage and waited”. What are they waiting for? What might the locals be aware of? Every time I read the writer’s unnerving and influential tale, I recall that the top terror originates in that which remains hidden.

An Acclaimed Writer

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this concise narrative a couple travel to a typical coastal village where bells ring continuously, a constant chiming that is annoying and puzzling. The opening very scary episode takes place at night, when they decide to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. There’s sand, there is the odor of rotting fish and seawater, there are waves, but the ocean seems phantom, or something else and more dreadful. It’s just deeply malevolent and every time I visit to the shore at night I recall this story that destroyed the ocean after dark for me – in a good way.

The recent spouses – the wife is youthful, the husband is older – go back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden encounters danse macabre chaos. It’s a chilling reflection on desire and deterioration, two bodies growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and brutality and tenderness of marriage.

Not only the scariest, but likely a top example of short stories available, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of these tales to appear in Argentina in 2011.

Catriona Ward

Zombie from Joyce Carol Oates

I delved into this narrative near the water in France a few years ago. Even with the bright weather I experienced an icy feeling through me. I also felt the excitement of anticipation. I was writing a new project, and I faced a wall. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to craft various frightening aspects the story includes. Going through this book, I realized that there was a way.

Released decades ago, the story is a grim journey into the thoughts of a criminal, the main character, inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, the criminal who killed and dismembered multiple victims in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. Notoriously, Dahmer was fixated with making a compliant victim who would never leave by his side and attempted numerous grisly attempts to achieve this.

The acts the novel describes are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its own emotional authenticity. The protagonist’s dreadful, shattered existence is simply narrated in spare prose, names redacted. The reader is plunged caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that shock. The strangeness of his mind resembles a physical shock – or being stranded on a desolate planet. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are consumed entirely.

An Accomplished Author

White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began having night terrors. On one occasion, the horror featured a nightmare where I was stuck within an enclosure and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a part from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; during heavy rain the downstairs hall filled with water, maggots dropped from above on to my parents’ bed, and once a sizeable vermin ascended the window coverings in my sister’s room.

Once a companion presented me with this author’s book, I was residing elsewhere with my parents, but the story regarding the building perched on the cliffs appeared known to myself, longing as I was. It’s a novel concerning a ghostly noisy, sentimental building and a female character who ingests limestone off the rocks. I loved the story immensely and came back frequently to it, always finding {something